meerkat
Photo via Meerkat

Meerkats used to be adorable little creatures found in Africa. But now, Meerkat is an incredibly addictive, easy-to-use, live-video streaming app that works via your Twitter account.

It’s also causing quite the stir on the Internets.

“We wanted to give you the option to press one button and stream live video over Twitter in the most frictionless way possible,” explained Ben Rubin, co-founder of the app’s developer, Air, when he submitted the project to Product Hunt last Friday and asked users to give it a try.

Well, Meerkat delivers. Really well. After downloading the app, you can write what’s going on and press stream. It automatically syncs to your Twitter account, so your network can watch your live-streamed content via a tweet. You can schedule tweets for later, too.

And while Meerkat is pretty much any social-sharing-real-time-media freak’s wildest dream, it was temporarily down on Twitter yesterday, from about 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. PT.

No official word on why yet, but it’s being speculated that it was Twitter’s anti-spam system. Meerkat’s Rubin told TechCrunch that “the shut down of Meerkat’s auto-tweeting was automatic on Twitter’s part. It was not a rate limit issue, and Twitter has been ‘awesome’ about helping restore service.”

Let’s face it: it’s really difficult to put a new spin on social sharing these days that isn’t complete garbage. Meerkat is probably the first new app that’s come along in a while that adds an element of fun back to the space. It’s available for download on the App Store.

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